"Cosmic tenor" Herman White gives talk on origins of universe

Herman White, North Central Trustee and senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, will give a presentation on how the universe came to be on Jan. 15 at the St. Louis Science Center. He and two other African-American physicists, the "Three Cosmic Tenors," who also love opera, will talk on what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 81st birthday. They will discuss string theory, particle physics and astrophysics, and how these areas of study help us better understand the origins of the universe.
For the past 33 years, White has been a member of the Fermilab’s scientific staff and has collaborated on many high-energy particle physics experiments as well as the design of high-energy particle beam and detector systems.
White has received numerous awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation travel fellowship to CERN, Geneva Switzerland in 1972, a university fellowship in physics at Yale University 1976-1978, and his selection as the third Illinois Industrial Research Corridor Fellow for North Central College in 1994. In February, he will be awarded the 2010 Edward A. Bouchet Award by the American Physical Society.
White is a senior scientist at the highest energy particle accelerator in the world, where atoms, the basic units of matter, are smashed to reveal information about our world and its makeup.
He earned his B.A. in physics at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., then completed his graduate education in nuclear and accelerator physics at Michigan State University and high energy and particle physics at Yale University and Florida State University, earning his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics.